The Work
On Being a Christian (Christ sein) was published in German by Piper Verlag, Munich, in 1974. The English translation by Edward Quinn appeared from Doubleday in 1976. At approximately 720 pages, it is a systematic account of Christian faith addressed to intelligent, educated non-specialists - written for the person who has been shaped by modern secular culture and wonders whether Christian commitment is still intellectually defensible. Küng explicitly situates the book between two audiences: the secularized person who has left the church and wonders if there is any reason to return, and the practicing Christian who needs a theologically serious account of what they believe.
The book became an international bestseller - unusual for a work of serious theology - and was translated into numerous languages. In 1979, following the publication of On Being a Christian and Küng's work on papal infallibility, the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith withdrew Küng's missio canonica (authorization to teach as a Catholic theologian), in part because of his handling of Christology in On Being a Christian.
Biblical Engagement
Mark 1:1 - 'The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God' - is Küng's starting point. Against two alternatives - a Christianity defined by abstract doctrines (creedal Christianity without historical grounding) and a secular humanism that has replaced Christ with human values - Küng insists on the primacy of the historical Jesus. The 'beginning' of Mark is the beginning of everything: the historically actual person of Jesus of Nazareth is the norm and criterion of Christian faith. No subsequent doctrine, institution, or experience can be authentically Christian that is not grounded in and measured by this historical person.
John 14:6 - 'I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me' - is both affirmed and carefully qualified. Küng affirms the uniqueness of Christ as the decisive revelation of God for Christians; he questions whether this uniqueness implies the absolute exclusion of all salvific value in other religious traditions. His treatment of the world religions in the final section of the book - arguing that Christ provides the distinctive character of Christian faith without necessarily implying the damnation of non-Christians - was one of the positions that made the Vatican uneasy.
Luke 4:18 - Jesus's proclamation at Nazareth - is central to Küng's argument about Jesus's identity. He argues that the historical Jesus is best understood through his proclamation of the Kingdom of God: a radical announcement of God's unconditional love for the marginalized, the tax collectors, the sinners, the women, the Samaritans. This Jesus - the historical Jesus of the Gospels - is not a figure of comfortable bourgeois piety but a disturbing, demanding, socially revolutionary figure whose identification with the rejected and excluded makes his church's social conservatism a standing scandal.
Matthew 11:28 - 'Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest' - is invoked in the book's pastoral dimension: Küng's argument that the historical Jesus offers precisely what modern secular culture cannot - rest, orientation, meaning, and a ground for hope that transcends the individual life. The book's apologetic strategy is to show that the questions modern people are asking - about meaning, justice, love, death, and the future - are questions to which the historical Jesus provides a credible answer.
The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) is treated extensively as the core of Jesus's ethical teaching. Küng insists that the Sermon's demands - including the love of enemies and the renunciation of violence - are genuinely applicable to modern Christians and cannot be domesticated into counsels of mere interior disposition. They describe an 'ethics of the Kingdom' that is demanding but possible for those who have been transformed by encounter with the living Christ.
Author and Context
Hans Küng (1928-2021) was born in Sursee, Switzerland, and educated at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, the Institut Catholique de Paris, and the Sorbonne. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1954 and appointed professor of theology at the University of Tübingen in 1960, where he remained until his retirement in 1996. He was appointed as a peritus (theological expert) to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), where he became one of the leading voices for renewal and reform.
Küng's career was marked by a series of increasingly sharp confrontations with the Vatican. His book The Church (1967) challenged traditional ecclesiology; Infallible? An Inquiry (1971) directly challenged the dogma of papal infallibility defined at Vatican I. On Being a Christian raised Christological questions that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith found inadequate to the standards of Catholic orthodoxy. The withdrawal of his missio canonica in 1979 did not prevent him from continuing to teach (he remained a Catholic priest and a university professor) but removed his status as an officially authorized Catholic theologian.
The intellectual context was the post-Vatican II period, in which Catholic theology was attempting both to assimilate the Council's reforms and to engage seriously with modern secular culture. The question 'What does it mean to be a Christian in the modern world?' was genuinely pressing for millions of Catholics (and other Christians) who had been shaped by the intellectual traditions of the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, historical-critical biblical scholarship, and the social revolutions of the 1960s.
Structure and Argument
The book proceeds in four movements. Part 1 ('The Horizon') addresses the contemporary secular alternatives to Christianity - humanism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, atheism - and argues that they are unable to provide adequate answers to the deepest human questions. Part 2 ('The Distinction') argues that Christianity is distinguished from all human religion by its grounding in the concrete historical person of Jesus of Nazareth. Part 3 ('The Program') is the heart of the book: an extended presentation of the historical Jesus and his significance. Part 4 ('Practice') draws out the ethical and practical implications for Christian life.
Küng's treatment of the resurrection is significant and was controversial: he affirms the resurrection as a genuine event - Jesus did not merely 'live on' in the disciples' memory - while questioning the historical literalism of empty-tomb apologetics. The resurrection is a real event in which God definitively vindicated Jesus and raised him to a new mode of existence; its precise relation to the physical body is a question on which Küng is deliberately agnostic.
Reception and Controversy
The book was acclaimed by liberal Catholics, Protestant theologians, and many secular reviewers as a model of theologically serious popular theology. It was criticized by conservative Catholic theologians for its treatment of the resurrection, its qualified Christology, and its openness to other religions. The Vatican's action in 1979 made Küng a cause célèbre and arguably increased the book's readership by giving it the cachet of forbidden fruit.
Legacy
On Being a Christian established a genre: the comprehensive, academically serious, but popularly accessible engagement with Christian faith addressed to educated secular readers. Its approach - beginning with secular questions, engaging modern culture on its own terms, arriving at a presentation of Jesus that is grounded in historical scholarship rather than doctrinal tradition - influenced subsequent works by Catholic and Protestant theologians including Walter Kasper, Edward Schillebeeckx, and Jürgen Moltmann. It remains one of the most widely read works of twentieth-century systematic theology.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Mark 1:14-15 (the proclamation of the Kingdom), Luke 4:16-30 (Jesus's programmatic statement at Nazareth), Matthew 5-7 (the Sermon on the Mount), John 1:1-18 (the theological interpretation of Jesus in the Prologue), and 1 Corinthians 15:1-28 (the resurrection and its significance).
Further Reading
- Hans Küng, Does God Exist? (1978) - the companion volume, addressing the philosophical question of God's existence that precedes the Christological question. - Robert Nowell, A Passion for Truth: Hans Küng - A Biography (1981) - the early biography, written at the time of the Vatican action. - Hermann Häring and Karl-Joseph Kuschel, eds., Hans Küng: New Horizons for Faith and Thought (1993) - a festschrift that assesses Küng's theological contribution across his career.